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Britain’s leading museums are employing full-time staff to revisit their colonial-era collections, in a bid to acknowledge the controversies of where they came from.

Major institutions including the British Museum and V&A are working to reassess the provenance of some of their key objects brought to Britain from overseas under the Empire, to provide an honest assessment for visitors.

The collections have come under increasing pressure in recent years to acknowledge “stolen” items, facing calls to return star objects to their native countries.

The British Museum, which holds the Elgin marbles and Benin bronzes, has regularly emphasised the “great public benefit” of having such items on display in the context of its world collection, and its commitment to the safe-keeping of its treasures.

But, as a new generation of visitors demand answers, it, along with the V&A and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, has encouraged staff to look again at its labels.

The Pitt Rivers MuseumCredit:
Alamy Stock Photo

The V&A has “strengthened its commitment to provenance research”, a spokesman said, recently appointing a dedicated “Provenance and Spoliation Research Curator”, to look into the origins of the Gilbert Collection, made up of gold and silver, enamel miniatures, gold boxes and mosaics amassed through the 20th century, and coordinate the museum’s overall re-examination of where objects came from.

The event programme of 2018 included conferences on colonial history entitled “Troubling Objects” and “Practices of Engagement with Contested Heritage Collections”.

A current exhibition about the 150th anniversary of the siege and battle of Maqdala - the culmination of the British expedition to Abyssinia - was developed “close consultation” with the Ethiopian embassy in London and an advisory group from the Ethiopian community and representatives from the Orthodox Tewahedo Church, Anglo-Ethiopian society and Rastafarian community, a spokesman said.

Tristram Hunt at the V&ACredit:
Getty

At the British Museum, curators are incorporating new provenance research into audio guides, as well as striving for “very honest” labels.

The label on the Benin bronzes currently suggests they were among the “thousands of treasures taken as booty” in a “punitive expedition” in Nigeria.

The information provided alongside a controversial bark shield from New South Wales, thought to have been brought back by Captain Cook, admits: “First contacts in the Pacific were often tense and violent.”

It also has a series of tours focusing on objects with colonial pasts and how they entered the collection.

Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is advertising for a research assistant to manage a labelling project, to “identify and find ways to redress a range of ethical issues in the current displays”.

Paid between £32,236 and £39,609, the successful candidate will “tackle a complex problem around historical labelling and language-use in the much-loved and criticised Pitt Rivers Museum”, with the aim to “dissect and dismantle some of the complex contested words, stereotypes and concepts that are present not only in museums but in society at large”.

Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A said: “Through exhibitions, conservation work, provenance research, talks, and events, the V&A is committed to exploring our own colonial history with rigour and transparency - and to building platforms for partnership and collaboration around the world.”

Writing in The Art Newspaper in December, he said on the topic: “As Edward Said has written, ‘partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic’.

“So as we rightly debate the call to restitute colonised cultures from museums, we might also reflect on where that line of thinking can lead. Some fear, first of all, the objects—and then the people.”

It follows a number of temporary exhibitions which have aimed to tackle the issue head on.

The curators of the Royal Academy’s Oceania exhibition this year welcomed a “sea change” in how museums showcase other cultures.

The exhibition saw indigenous communities privately bless sacred objects before they went on display, with curators conducting hundreds of conversations with the many tribal communities of the Pacific Islands.

The British Museum's Aboriginal exhibition faced similar constraints, with measures including a ban on photography in particular rooms out of respect for indigenous culture.